


Lab

by KarkaHatchlings



Series: Guild Wars 2 Interstitial [18]
Category: Guild Wars 2 (Video Game), Guild Wars Series (Video Games)
Genre: Childhood Memories, Conversations, Fluff, Gen, Loss of Parent(s), Slice of Life, Things Unsaid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-22 08:10:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17056088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KarkaHatchlings/pseuds/KarkaHatchlings
Summary: An asura visits her surviving progenitor.





	Lab

Daylight streamed into the small laboratory from both directions:  the large, open entrance facing Soren Draa, and the crumbling hole in the angled roof at the back.  The unplanned aperture was old enough that ivy had taken root long ago, draping thick vines halfway to the floor, just above the height of an asura.  Junior krewe members kept it trimmed back. Someone had placed a ceramic beaker underneath the thickest clump of ivy to catch the runoff from the afternoon Maguuma rains.  It was near to overflowing and the steady drip was one of the few noises in the nigh-empty lab.    
  
With a sigh, Pleek stooped and lifted the heavy beaker.  For a moment she considered replacing it with her helmet, but she'd left that on a workbench across the lab when she came in.  Instead, she carried the beaker to the room's central drain and dumped it. Unidentifiable clumps of lab waste gurgled back up from the ill-cleaned drain. When she nudged one that threatened to float away back toward the stone grille, it sizzled and left a stain on the pointed metal toecap of her sabaton.   
  
After the catchbasin was back in its place she waddled over to her seat across a workbench from her father.  "Thank you," he didn't glance up from the delicate crystal matrix he was piecing together with a pair of hammered mithril tongs.     
  
It was a novel arrangement, she could see, repurposed motivator fragments providing the robust connection base for a stripped-down mandate incantoreceptor.  That was not the sort of work her progenitor's krewe specialized in. It was to fix their only heavy labor golem without expensive replacement parts. Probably patent-worthy all the same.    
  
She waited while he methodically tested each connection by channeling a minute arcane charge through them.  Intellectually she was familiar with the process, but lacked his fine touch. Her own talents ran toward powerful but less-consistent surges of magic.  The patience to sit through his work had been developed when the precise channelling skill turned out to not be her forte. It served her better with her particular associations.  Suddenly self-conscious, she straightened her breastplate.

"So, I've heard about the big happenings in Lion's Arch," he pressed the casing closed on the matrix with a businesslike metallic click.   
  
Pleek ducked her head, spilling braids and long ears about her face. "We all did what we could."  Her father's eyes were enormous when he peered at her through the magnifying lenses he was still wearing.  Whatever else she didn't inherit, she had his hazel eyes. “The city won’t be the same for a long time even so.”

"Bad business," the comment was completely unnecessary, "College educations are for asura, after all."  Pleek had heard plenty of self-absolution for the devastation of Lion's Arch in Rata Sum already.   
  
"A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing."   
  
"When incomplete!" he completed the exchange her progenitors had at least once daily. Her father sighed, pushing the lenses up his tall, spotted forehead and knuckling his eyes.  The dark circles beneath them went nowhere. "She was always so stubborn about that."   
  
Pleek glanced around the lab.  "How is mom?" The stone-sided pyramid was high up on a shelf this time, she saw when her father's far-off gaze lead her to it.   
  
"Same as always."  Her father was seeing something other than the angular relief spirals that decorated the basalt faces of the pyramid.  The cap was silver, colored with verdigris, and fit into a notch which sealed the container. "I keep meaning to run a few tests.  Energetic residues. Might shed some light on the inconsistent results of the experiment."   
  
She'd heard it every time she visited, but her mother's ashes, swept up after the accident that immolated her and blew the hole in the ceiling, were still carefully stored. "I could get her down for you," offered Pleek.    
  
"No, no," the objection was faint, distant, "no, I'll get the golem working again.  No need to put yourself out."   
  
Pleek had been at Metamystics when the accident happened, had heard the explosion like an enormous cork popping from a bottle.  It wasn't until classes let out that she could see it was her progenitors' lab. Ghostly fire had still been crackling in slow motion from the unplanned skylight and most of the furniture and fittings were scattered on the thoroughfare below the laboratory balcony.     
  
Bracing splayed claws on the workbench, her father suppressed a grunt of effort.  She hurried around the workbench to help him up. His grip on her arm was still firm, but he leaned on her when he limped over to the slumped Mark I golem.  The accident hadn't left him unscathed either.   
  
"And the boys?"

"Excellent prospects, both of them," he beamed, "superlative krewe placement, you know.  Pyrotone." She hadn't known the name the first time she heard it, but that was more due to her absence from the scientific community than any obscurity on the krewe's part.   
  
"They'll publish soon on their work with reciprocating combustolithic inclusions."  She helped him up onto a stool so he could reach the matrix cavity and replace the repaired part.  "And be able to claim most of the credit for it." An important caveat in krewe politics.   
  
She hadn't seen the boys in years, Pleek realized.  They hadn't been close in the first place, bonding more naturally with each other rather than their aloof elder sister. The spark to the cremation oven had been her choosing independent field study over the more traditional route to College accreditation via lecture halls and laboratories.  Nevermind her complete lack of krewe placement to the present day.   
  
"Even if they don't express it," her father was saying, "they're grateful for your support."  Pleek suppressed a snort but otherwise kept silent. She didn't think it likely.   
  
"After the unexpected outcome of your mother's experiment, placing them would have been hard without the money you sent home."  His still-agile hands had stopped their work on the golem.   
  
Acknowledgment caught in her throat.  Instead, she watched a tiny ooze extend a pseudopod from beneath one of the workbenches, snatch up a morsel of waste from the lab drain, and then recoil back into its hiding place.  It was easier to say nothing.   
  
What she'd really been doing by paying her brothers' way through College was buying her freedom, but it had taken her years to realize that.  It wasn't an expected outcome and had been overlooked when she embarked on the experiment that lead away from her progenitors' laboratory, away from Rata Sum.  For her, there'd be no half-deserted lab when whatever krewe took her in fell on hard times. No publishing, no backbiting over credit, no tenure squabbles. No "inconsistent results" snatching away her or someone she loved.

"I'm doing fine, dad," Pleek looked up at him.  She didn't care if it was a non-sequitur, that she was interrupting some rambling account of interkrewe politics. 

"Guild life's suited me.  We're doing good things for the world.  Orr, the Mistwar, Scarlet Briar's invasions."  Her father glanced at her over his lenses, but didn't protest the change of subject.  "The guild leader is a good man." 

"It's a human, yes?" He apparently didn't recall.  Returning his attention to his work kept him from meeting her eyes.  "I hope you're able to direct him."

At least he wouldn't see the wry smile, she reflected. "I'm a valued adviser.  He consults me closely on almost everything."

"Good, good!"  It was hard to tell if her father was commenting on what she'd said or the successful repair.  The golem began merrily burbling through its power-up cycle. When he stepped down from the stool, she put out a hand to steady him while he examined his work.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted in /gw2g/.
> 
> Locations referenced here correspond to in-game locations: Splorg Metamystics Lab, and the main concourse and balcony of Soren Draa.


End file.
